


A Chill In The Air

by theterribletyrian



Category: Guild Wars
Genre: Asura (Guild Wars), Domestic Violence, Friendship, Gen, Loneliness, Metrica Province (Guild Wars), Progeny (Guild Wars)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 08:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5450003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theterribletyrian/pseuds/theterribletyrian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Isra and Sheppa continue an informal tradition of meeting before dawn atop the roof of Splorg Metamysticals in Metrica Province.  They enjoy some peace and quiet with each other and the world, marred somewhat by some dark recollections, before everyone else's day begins and it all turns into a noisy, bustling mess.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Chill In The Air

**Author's Note:**

> * TRIGGERS: This piece mentions domestic violence in an indirect way (but does not have any descriptions of the violence actually occurring); however, please be careful if you are triggered by anything related to that.  
> 
> * TIMELINE: Isra here is quite young; she hasn't yet left precollege, and the world as she knows it is limited to the southern end of Metrica Province and parts of Rata Sum.  
> 
> * THANKS: To Nox from my awesome RP guild [Mist] (The Mistwatch Initiative), for providing the writing challenge prompt that led to this piece!  
> 

"Isra?" ****

As always, Sheppa finds me on the roof, a series of stealthy footfalls my only warning before she calls out. She keeps her voice low, as do I when I answer. I know very well I'm not supposed to be here and so does she, but the rules don't really apply to me any more. Morning after morning, I scale the steeply-angled sides of Splorg Metamysticals because I have nowhere better to be. It wouldn't make a difference if I were anywhere else. And here, at least, I have a view.

"Hey, Sheppa." Today I'm staring northwest, toward Hydrone Unit's complex. It's too far to see clearly through the darkness and early morning fog, but I know from past explorations that the roof is almost identical to the one here at Splorg. I wonder if anyone ever climbs up there in the hours before dawn just to think. Just to be alone with the world when it's silent, when it smells of nothing but damp grass and clean air.

There's a scuffling sound, then a soft grunt. Sheppa lowers herself -- slowly -- to sit beside me, feet dangling next to mine. She's got new wraps on today, ones I'm pretty sure I haven't seen before. The cloth -- blue, I think, though even I can't tell for sure -- twists cleverly between her toes, but fully covers her soles. Fashionable _and_ practical. She might be tasked with cleaning up the spectacular messes we make in the labs, but she still has a sense of style.

"How goes the world today?" she yawns, covering her mouth delicately. Her hand is an indistinct blob of pale brown, shifting in the gloom.

I shrug. My second-best tunic is already full of wrinkles, so I don't even try to keep it straight as I twist around to check the sky behind us. "It goes. Fog's pretty dense, but we did get a decent shower yesterday, and it was reasonably cold last night." Sunrise is a whisper that grows louder as I speak, a murky halo just beginning to lift its head above the horizon. This is why I'm here, at this hour. I nudge her shoulder and point. "Look."

The mist in front of us begins to glow as if with a light of its own, some great, slumbering beast just beginning to stir. Our shadows stretch like dark spectres across its flaxen back, huge and misleading. We could be humans, if shadows told the truth; we could even be Norn. We could be anything we wanted to be. Giants. Gods. Anything but a useless progeny and a janitor.

Then the sun rises in earnest, shrinking our brief potential. We are only us: two outcast asura, one chocolate, one caramel. Small, insignificant, and alone.

* * *

When I was six, my parents declared me a failure.

I hadn't built a working golem. I couldn't tell a resistor from a transistor. I could write, and surprisingly well at that, but I'd only begun to speak two years prior: halting, awkward sentences with a tendency to embarrass everyone. I had no fine motor control to speak of, save with a pen. What I _did_ have was a distressing habit of falling over everything, including my own too-big feet.

They were wary of letting me use so much as a spoon by myself, which pretty much ruled out anything fun I might have looked forward to using. Like thaumagnetic screwdrivers, or flamethrowers that ran on bio-fuel, or the Hyper-Dimensional Translocomotor that our next-door neighbour was building in his backyard. It was very, _very_ clear that, unlike my two elder siblings, I wasn't going to be The Next Big Thing. No amount of cajoling, yelling, or beating would ever change that.

And you know, that should have been the end of it, and I assigned to the shameful, dark innards of some obscure and unimportant building in the middle of nowhere. Alas, my mother despaired in that uniquely tragic and loud way she has, and my father ... well, he had a reputation to maintain. His other progeny had been the talk of Metrica for the past six years -- two very bright feathers in his genetic cap -- and one stupid offspring wasn't about to mess that up for him.

So he 'donated' an obscene amount of money to the acting director of Splorg, who aside from being a genius was dead broke at the time and needed funding to complete his latest experiment. Thus, Isra the Failure became Isra the Student Failure, because it wasn't like entering precollege changed anything about my fundamental lack of know-how.

It just meant that I could be somebody else's problem for a while.

* * *

We sit in silence for a good twenty minutes, just watching the way the sunlight spills over everything, melting the fog until the world is green and vibrant, filled with countless moving forms: small fleshlings like us, and our larger, mechanical counterparts. Metrica wouldn't be Metrica without golems, and they're everywhere we look: clearing ground, lifting equipment, and duking it out in Battleground Plaza, which we can just see from here through a convenient gap in the trees. Between the plaza and Hydrone stands a structure I've irreverently dubbed the Unholy Altarnator (pun fully intended). It looks like an open-air sacrificial killing ground, asura-style, decked about with floating flower arrangements and epically long ramps leading to a circular (and completely empty, save some broken golems) platform. The whole thing sits under three gigantic triangular panes of glass, and nobody, not even our professors, know what it's called.

Below us, raised voices and laughter herald the arrival of my classmates -- all of whom are happier not knowing where I am -- and my instructors. Who, I'm pretty sure, don't even know I'm missing.

See, halfway through last year, my utter inability to grasp basic technical and scientific concepts finally got the better of everyone. Classmates refused to partner me in lab activities. Visiting tutors shook their heads, pursed their lips, and 'regretfully declined' to take me on as a student. Whispers started, became rumours, and grew. I was, officially, the first asura in history to be dumber than a skritt.

My desk, which had started out somewhere in the middle of the general studies area, migrated mysteriously to the back. Then off to the side. Then down a couple of ramps and around a wall, until finally I was relegated to an isolated corner of Landing 2B, from which location I could barely hear the lessons my father had, in his pride, paid so dearly to provide.

For three days, I'd shown up when I was supposed to. I'd seated myself at my desk, feeling like a complete idiot as I stared blankly at the greenish, mildewed wall in front of me. I'd ignored the startled looks of the occasional research assistant or professor hurrying past, and flipped my ears open as wide as they would go. Hoping to catch all the information that leaked unsteadily down from the main floor above, like ooze overflowing a specimen container. Hoping to learn, even then.

When it became obvious that nobody cared about me chilling in the stairwell instead of sitting in the classroom, I walked away from the desk, and never went back. For all I know, it's still there. But I haven't been back inside to check. I don't come here every morning because I'm getting an education, though as far as I know, my father is still paying for the tuition that Splorg seems unwilling to actually give.

I come here because it just so happens to have a nice, high roof from which I can watch the world go by in peace. Nobody ever disturbs me up here except Sheppa, and she's got her own reasons for getting away from it all. Thirty-odd arrogant, messy reasons in the classrooms below. One big, violent reason at home.

* * *

She doesn't know that I know, but when she rocked up to our rooftop perch for the fourth time in six weeks sporting a suspiciously dark splotch around one bright blue eye, I said nothing. But I took it upon myself to follow her back to her house under cover of darkness, when she was done with her evening rounds.

What I heard that night, tucked invisibly into a crevice in the nearby cliff face, told me everything I needed to know. My body ached in sympathy as I crept away, unnoticed. I didn't do anything to stop it, because nobody had ever stopped it from happening to me. I was young and scared, and I didn't even know it _could_ be stopped. Because it doesn't matter whether it's a fist or a knife, it's the person who does it that makes it hurt, and they'd always been bigger and stronger than me. Maybe whoever was in there with Sheppa was bigger and stronger than her, too.

And for all I knew, we both deserved it anyway. At least, that's what I'd always been told.

So today, when I see that she's moving stiffly, I bite my tongue. I don't ask how she is, because she never likes talking about herself after a night like that. I never do, either. I take her company for what it is -- a gift of tacit understanding, undeserved and unasked for -- and lend her the same in return.

"It's gonna be a scorcher," I remark. She nods, tipping her head to watch the brilliant orange flash of a parrot as it swoops by. The fog is long gone, leaving treetops shimmering in the day's rising heat. I can see for miles in every direction. If I cross my eyes a bit, the sunlit greens and browns and blues that are so familiar to me turn into a sprawling canvas of possibility, populated only by my imagination.

So I let the world blur, and imagine us wanted, and loved. I imagine Sheppa safe from the harm that lurks behind her door, and me surrounded by people who care. I imagine us queens: respected, admired, essential, untouchable. I imagine us laughing, because we have so little to laugh about.

I reach out, wordlessly, and take her hand in mine.

The sun is hot on our backs, but as long as we bear this pain, we will never be warm.


End file.
